ED SOUTHGATE FROM THE SUN
A CIVILIAN’S hands were boiled and her face was smashed in by Putin’s soldiers in a torture chamber, she revealed.
Others suffered electric shocks to their genitals and ears, were beaten up and suffocated by various methods, victims told law enforcement.
Prisoners were stuffed in overcrowded cells in Kherson, Ukraine, without sanitation or sufficient food or water for up to two months.
Some were also blindfolded and bound, had severe bruising and broken bones and suffered sexual violence including forced nudity, accounts said.
And physical assaults were particularly brutal on men, sometimes lasting for hours, one detainee said.
Russia captured Kherson in March, about a month after it launched war against Ukraine. It then withdrew in November.
Oksana Minenko, 44, claimed she was repeatedly detained and tortured by Russian soldiers. The accountant said: “One pain grew into another. I was a living corpse.”
Troops put her hands in boiling water, ripped off her finger nails and smashed her face with rifle butts so badly she needed plastic surgery, she claimed.
Men also forced her to undress then beat her while her hands were tied to a chair and her head was covered.
She said: “When you have a bag on your head and you’re being beaten, there is such a vacuum, you cannot breathe, you cannot do anything, you cannot defend yourself.”
Minenko reckons she was targeted because her husband was a Ukrainian soldier. He died defending Kherson’s Antonivskyi bridge on the first day of full-scale war.
Troops turned up at his burial and made her kneel next to his grave, firing their guns in mock execution, she claimed.
Men in Russian military uniforms and balaclavas subsequently turned up at her home on three occasions at night in March and April to interrogate her and take her into detention.
Olha, 26, says she was beaten, given electric shocks and subjected to forced nudity and torture by Russian forces.
Meanwhile, Andrii, 35, said he was beaten, forced to undress and had his genitals and ears electric shocked over five days.
He said: “It’s like a ball flying into your head and you pass out.”
His captors interrogated him over weapons and explosives storage, he said, because they thought he was linked to a resistance movement.
